Margaret Atwood has captured the imagination, creeping dread, and defiant spirits of generations across the world with her work—from the near-future dystopia of The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Booker Prize-winning The Testaments (2019), to the compelling tangle of women’s lives in Cat’s Eye (1988).
“Time is not a line but a dimension,” she wrote in Cat’s Eye. “You don’t look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.”
Today, the Canadian author announces her new work of nonfiction, Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, set for release by Doubleday in the US on November 4, 2025. Why now? “My publishers made me do it,” Atwood tells Vogue, a wicked tone to her voice over the phone from a visit to Mexico. “When they first proposed it, I said, ‘Oh, that would be so boring.’ I mean, I wrote a book, I wrote another book, I wrote another book…Who’s going to read that?” (So says one of the world’s most prolific authors, who, since 1969, has written 17 novels, as well as 19 books of poetry, 11 nonfiction works, nine short story collections, eight children’s books, and three graphic novels.)
The idea for a memoir became more compelling when her publishers said they wanted a “memoir in a literary style.”
“Simply, a memoir is what you remember, and what you mostly remember—if you think of your own life—is stupid things and catastrophes. It’s not: ‘I went for a walk. I had a lovely dinner. Here’s a picture of my food.’ I thought of my own life, the stupid and the big, and how all of that affected the writing of the books,” Atwood says.
Book of Lives links the golden threads from Atwood’s acclaimed literary works with her own expansive life and cultural impact—from her nomadic childhood through the far north of Canada to her time in East Berlin, where she wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, and her long partnership with writer Graeme Gibson (and their rag-tag bunch of bohemian friends) in Alliston and Toronto, Ontario. Sometimes life mirrored art and vice-versa, other times she was writing about snow-capped peaks in Cat’s Eye in the blazing Australian sun. There were times too that she describes as “horrible fun,” finding moments of light and creativity while conservative politics bore down on women, Atwood writing through it all.
